Spanish Department

Contemporary Afro-Brazilian poets challenge the harsh social reality confronted by black women, who have historically suffered from race, gender, and class discrimination in a country with a black majority population. By focusing on the intersections of black female experiences, African cultural heritage and the construction of diverse black identities, Dr. Rodrigues will explore the ethical and aesthetic implications of contemporary Afro-Brazilian women’s poetry.

Nearly one hundred years since its first edition (1924), a reappraisal of The Vortex (known as La vorágine in Spanish), by the Colombian novelist José Eustasio Rivera, was a timely necessity. While it has been widely enjoyed by millions of readers, since the date of its publication, this novel had not been properly explored or understood in all its potentialities. Despite the powerful historical and social message The Vortex so successfully communicates, regrettably, Rivera’s protest had been almost ignored or forgotten.

In 2015, Vanessa Ruiz received widespread criticism and national attention for pronouncing words from Spanish with a Spanish accent during English broadcasts. In this talk, she will detail her experiences of standing up to the racism she faced and moving forward.

Vanessa Ruiz is the Emmy Award-winning Director, News Anchor, and Arizona State University Professor of Practice of the Borderlands reporting team at Cronkite News and Cronkite Noticias, the news division of Arizona PBS, as well as a Cronkite ambassador for diversity and inclusion.

As part of a book-project, German Labrador Méndez (Princeton University), will reflect on the political imagination of the 2008’s crisis and its cultural implications, in the Iberian context and beyond. The past decade can be understood as a time marked by the anxieties of the economic turmoil and their inscription in bodies, urban spaces and ecosystems. The crisis, seen as a material and psychic entourage, has been reflected by literary products and visual fictions in media, movies, internet platforms and social networks thanks to a veritable grammar of terror.

Today, no society is immune from the effects of capitalism. In Haiti “Batay La,” or the struggle, has been ongoing since before the slave revolution that founded the Caribbean nation. Batay La examines the current anti-imperialist movement in Haiti, led for decades by grassroots workers’ rights organization Batay Ouvriye (Workers Fight). Founded in 1994, Batay Ouvriye is known throughout Haiti as a fierce, uncompromised organization dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation of poor workers.

Ana López (Tulane University), one of the foremost scholars of Latin American film studies, explores affect, melodrama, and the movies in this public lecture.

Join us for a lecture and Q&A by Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo.  She will be discussing her installation Minimum Monument: Art as Emergency.

Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo brings her internationally known “Minimum Monument” event to Middlebury. With help from students, faculty, staff and members of the Middlebury community, she will install 300+ ice sculptures (little men and women) outside Davis Library. And then we will leave them to melt… or will we? A visual metaphor for climate change, Azevedo’s work challenges the traditional meaning of the public monument: “in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice.” A community event not to be missed.

Iván Thays will discuss the process of writing his 2008 novel, updating this with current information about this writing practice. In this novel, a white middle-class character travels from Lima, the capital of Peru, to Ayacucho, a rural region in the Andes where widespread human rights violations occurred during the bloody internal conflict (1980-1997) between the Peruvian government and insurgent organizations such as the People’s Guerrilla Army (armed wing of the Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

Alejandro Kelly Hopfenblatt (Universidad de Buenos Aires/CONICET)